Subject: Gay Rights Emergence Forces Issues Japan Has Avoided Date: Published: 11/4/91 (155 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Japanese Gay Rights Groups Emerge, Spurring Confrontation With Issues Nation Has Avoided ---- By Yumiko Ono Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal TOKYO -- When Hiroshi Niimi's gay-activist group introduced itself last year at the Fuchu Youth Activity Center, a public Tokyo lodging facility, the other guests gasped. Snickering children peeped at group members while they bathed in the center's public bath. A Japanese Christian read aloud passages to the group against homosexuality from the Bible. Finally, a center official asked the group not to come back. Mr. Niimi says it was then that he felt he should stand up for his rights. So he and 250 other members of the Association for the Gay and Lesbian Movement, which uses the acronym Occur took the group's story to court, marking the first suit filed by a gay-rights group in Japan. Occur is demanding $43,000 in compensation from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Board of Education, which runs the Fuchu center, for barring homosexuals from staying overnight in public facilities. It is also seeking to have the prohibition removed. "It's a natural thing for us to do," says Mr. Niimi, a 26-year-old printing company worker and an executive director of Occur. "Why should we feel we have to stay in the closet? " Although Japan has followed a majority of U. S. liberation and equal-rights movements, the nation's perception of homosexuality of late hasn't. Although groups such as Occur hope to change that. A few centuries ago, homosexuality was so common and accepted that Japanese military and religious elites practiced it with openness that shocked Western missionaries. After Japan adopted Christian-based Western values at the turn of the century and enforced punishment against homosexuality, many Japanese avoided discussion of the subject as much as possible. Rather than publicly attack gay Japanese, society pretended that they didn't exist at all, and ignored them as long as they lived quietly amongst themselves. Gay Westerners flocked to live in Japan, finding life less hostile than at home. Lesbians, surprisingly, face a much tougher battle in gaining social tolerance. Now, gay Japanese are increasingly seeking recognition -- and respect -- from the public in a movement that activists call a "sexual earthquake." An Osaka-based gay group in September released a documentary describing their jobs, hangout spots and reception from society. Other gay groups organize symposiums or participate in San Francisco's gay-rights parade. And some gay people even plan to back a local gay political candidate in the next regional election in four years. The younger generation of Japanese are more conscious of the concept of standing up for themselves, says Shuhei Ninomiya, a professor of family law at Ritsumeikan University and one of Japan's few scholars studying the gay rights movement. "More and more people will start disclosing their identity as gays." No official statistics are available, but analysts estimate that gay men and women in Japan may number anywhere between 300,000 and three million. What's more, the gay movement has recently become a trendy topic, especially among young women. Women's monthly magazines, in particular, have been devoting pages to features touting the arrival of the "gay renaissance." Book stores stack their shelves with such titles as "Private Gay Life." Young women venture into what magazines claim to be "must-visit" gay bars clustered around the neon-infested Shinjuku district in Tokyo, puzzling regular customers. Giggly high-schoolers crowd movie theaters showing tragic tales of gay couples. Meanwhile, Tokyo government officials don't mask their confusion over Occur's sudden visibility and aggressiveness. "The youth house is built to promote sound development of young people," says Hideki Ishiyama, director of social education at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which is the defendant in the court case. A group of gay guests, he says, raises the danger "of threatening order" at the facility by causing other guests too much anxiety. The city isn't prejudiced against gay people, stresses Mr. Ishiyama, but it won't accept any gay groups to stay overnight in its public youth centers. Many hurdles await the case. For a start, neither the government officials nor the judges "really know how gay people lead their lives," says Shigenori Nakagawa, the lawyer representing Occur. For many Japanese, the dominant image of homosexuals is one of flashy "drag queen" personalities on television and gay bar owners in certain Tokyo entertainment districts. "The challenge is how to get the {judges} to rid themselves of their own stereotypes of gays, and look at the issue objectively," Mr. Nakagawa says. Under the lengthy Japanese legal procedures, the case may take about two years to settle, and American gay rights activists in San Francisco and New York are now scurrying to raise support for the case. Japanese gay-right activists don't want to completely emulate the vocal American gay-rights movement, though. Gay people in the U. S. have to seek attention because there's a powerful anti-gay movement that doesn't exist in Japan, says Occur's Mr. Niimi. While he says he was impressed to see so many gay people when he joined the San Francisco gay rights parade in June, "I didn't think America was the ideal situation," he says. "There's so much discrimination as well," he says. Besides, says Mr. Niimi, the Japanese public isn't as sympathetic to protests and marches as Americans are. Rather, Mr. Niimi hopes to raise publicity by publishing books, providing telephone counseling on AIDS, as well as drawing cartoons for a gay magazine. One reason the sexual-preference issue has been slow in coming to the forefront in Japan is because most people tended to dodge sex-related subjects in general. That has led to superficial sexual education in schools, for example, and a surprising lack of information about AIDS. There are nearly 400 AIDS patients in Japan, 13% of whom are homosexuals. While the figure is relatively low, 1,810 people have tested HIV-positive, and the numbers are on the rise. The current gay-rights movement comes as society's view on gays is softening, some say. That's because a growing number of Japanese strive to escape from the rigid stereotypical sex roles themselves, says Ritsumeikan University's Mr. Ninomiya. Women, for example, who work and seek independence find that they can sometimes talk to gay men on a more equal footing than straight men, he says, because most gay men "don't look at them as a sex object, but regard them just as another human being." Developing the gay rights movement throughout Japan will probably take some time. As long as homosexuals stay in the closet, "it's rare that they face open discrimination," says Yoshikazu Yano, a 26-year-old restaurant worker and a gay activist. So caught up are many Japanese gays in concealing their identity, he says, that unless someone takes initiative to seek recognition, "there are very few who question the present situation." But Mr. Yano hopes that disclosing more information about the daily lives of gay people would help make more people aware of the issue. He has staged two plays about gays in Japan, and portrays his daily life with his 25-year-old partner in a documentary film. To show a variety of "real-life" gay Japanese, Mr. Yano interviews a 61-year-old poet, a gay bar dancer and school teacher sporting a lavish fur coat and fancy earrings. A 20-year-old youth admits on film that he had an affair with Mr. Yano, enraging Mr. Yano's long-term partner. "What happens is all true," says Mr. Yano. The film, he says, "is one way of telling the {Japanese} people about ourselves." [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]